--- an anonymous nineteenth-century photograph of a Native-American boy

Come to water as to a page.

Point your fishing-rod and trawl,

scrawl the muddy floor. Reflection

swims into itself: bow meeting

bone—outline of a beak,

outline of another boy poking

his fishing-rod up

where yours impales

water’s skin. Tilt your head

into his liquid shadow—

read his featureless face. One

becomes many:

ghost-shirts whorl

like sage smoke. Ghosts

dissolve into a pollen trail. Chants

warble through the valley

where the dog-star web leads, where

you surely return.

The boy below the lake

waits, cawing the Nevada sun

to flood canyons with wraiths:

they feast on trout and bitterroot,

they feast on acorns and bergamot,

they feast on sweet cicely and violets,

their mouths erased like a smudge.

​

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​

THE STONES OF THE CITY

Livid lacerations on gray.

Chisels etch our granite like hot blades

scarifying flesh.

Trains & cars grub

through our primordial hulk,

volcanic clay.

Sacrificed

into slab and tile, into entablature

and pillar, we

—the expendable stones—

vanish

into secular parabolas.

Dense as complicity,

we buttress skyscrapers.

Without our heft, our dark

schist, those stories would soon

relinquish their gleam.

Color of wind, color of mind.

_____________________________________________

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dean Kostos from his book Rivering, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

All rights including electronic are reserved by the author.

___________________________________________________________________

OTHERWHERE --after a surrealist drawing by Benjamin Palencia

In arid elsewhere,musical bones leak melodies, released

by nuclear wind.Gray leaves sprout, confusing corrosive heat

for spring.The horizon line slices into Otherwhere.

Acidic as an aquatint,sun etches faces of inhabitants

who delightin hearing wounds’ laughter.

_____________________________________________________________________

Otherwhere: a new poem by Dean Kostos (C) 2015. All rights, including electronic reserved for the author.

Eco-Poems by

Dean Kostos

Dean Kostos’s collections include Rivering,Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and the chapbook Celestial Rust. He co-edited Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write about Their Mothers (a Lambda Book Award finalist) and edited Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry (its debut reading was held at the United Nations). His poems have appeared in over 300 journals and anthologies, such as Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Sweden), Southwest Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Stranger at Home, Token Entry, Vanitas, Western Humanities Review, and on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site Oxygen.com. His choral text, Dialogue: Angel of War, Angel of Peace, was set to music by James Bassi and performed by Voices of Ascension. His literary criticism has appeared on the Harvard UP Web site, in Talisman, and elsewhere. He has taught at Wesleyan, The Gallatin School of NYU, The City University of New York, and he has served as literary judge for Columbia University’s Gold Crown Awards. A recipient of a Yaddo fellowship, he also serves on the editorial board of Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. His poem “Subway Silk” was recently translated into a film by Canadian filmmaker Jill Clark.